TESTED BY FIRE: Neville Alexander

266pp., paperback, Mandela University Press, Gqwberha, 2025

ISBN: 9781998959105

Biography of linguist, educationalist, academic and anti-apartheid struggle veteran Neville Alexander (1936-2012).

Neville Alexander was born in Cradock. As a teacher and anti-apartheid activist he was involved with the Non-European Unity Movement and the Teachers’ League of South Africa. Arrested for his activities, he spent 10 years on Robben Island and a further five years under house arrest. After his release he did pioneering work in the field of language policy and planning, and founded The Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa (PRAESA), where he was director from 1992-2011. In 1981, he was appointed Director of the South African Committee for Higher Education (SACHED).

“This is the first biography of the life and contribution of Neville Alexander, the scholar and activist of Cape Town. It comes out of the privilege Doreen Musson had of almost walking in his shadow for decades. It is simultaneously intimate and scholarly. Musson knows things about Alexander’s life which will surprise the reader. How did she come to learn this, a reader might ask. But this intimacy also generates the substance for understanding the deeply important intellectual and political contribution Alexander made to South African and global thinking about issues such as ‘race’, language, and political struggle. A great contribution.” Crain Soudien, Professor Emeritus of Education and African Studies, UCT

“Neville Alexander was an outstanding Marxist intellectual. He didn’t simply make a very important theoretical contribution to the critique of racial capitalism and to our understanding of the national question in South Africa; he also put his neck on the line – serving ten years on Robben Island with Mandela and other ANC leaders for planning the armed struggle against apartheid in the early 1960s and striving for militant unity in the mass struggles of the 1980s. Doreen Musson’s vivid biography brings Neville fully alive, from his childhood in the Eastern Cape, through his intellectual and political blossoming in the turbulent resistance politics of Cape Town and the beginnings of the new left in Germany, to the great tests of his mature years. This book ensures that future generations can know him and learn from him.” Alex Callinicos, Emeritus Professor of European Studies, King’s College London

Doreen Musson is the author of Johnny Gomas, voice of the working class: A political biography.